Driver question: Ati? Omega? Dna? Ngo? UniAn? ....

[Rakido]

Hi Folks,

Bought myself an Asus AX800, wanted to try out the Omega's but found that lots of other drivers are available too. So, has anyone experience with these different tweaked drivers for the Radeon's? Found that some people here are using the Omega drivers, but what about the others like DNA or NGO? What are the advantages of them over the original ATI's or over Omega?


Thx
Rakido

[Gurm]

Ok here goes.

HISTORICALLY, ATI bungled driver updates a lot. They'd release a new driver which fixed a lot of things, but broke a whole bunch in OpenGL, for example. So a lot of people (including Omega) started remixing drivers - OpenGL from one, 3D from another, 2D from a third, video acceleration from somewhere else.

NOWADAYS, none of that happens. All of the non-ATI drivers you see are just tweaked. You could perform all the tweaks yourself with the Rage3D tweaker or one of the countless other ATI tweakers out there.

Some specifics:

Omega: Is the original ATI remixer. He also does nVidia remixes. He's on the ATI beta team, and really knows what he's doing. If you're going to get a non-ATI package, this is the one.

DNA: Written by a fellow named Killersneak. Killersneak stole Omega's code wholesale, renamed it, and released it as his DNA drivers. When he got caught doing this, he lied about it, then when faced with mounting evidence he disappeared. A few months later he reappeared claiming to have completely rewritten the drivers. Here's the problem - he CLAIMS that he REWRITES the drivers. ATI have taken action against him at least once. He claims to reverse-engineer their drivers and rewrite the DLL's. In notepad. *ahem* yeah, whatever. He's a nutbag.

The other ones? I know little about, but I suspect it's more "I prefer it this way instead of how Omega has it set".

[Rakido]

thx for the info, Jason.

I found a site where they did a comparison of the last two ATI's and some of the modded drivers, you can take a look here
http://www.whistlingcricket.com/guid...comparison&p=1

According to that the Omega's are the best overall choice.

And here's another site with a comparison (based on 5.6):
http://www.gognet.com/index.php?view...article=25&p=1
According to them NGO is best for benchmarking and Zeropoint for gaming ..

But i guess the Omega's are indeed the better choice.


Cya
Rakido

[Kurt]

beh, overall Omega is better, unless you play UT where ATi is better.

Anyway, all results fall within the error margin...I'd probably stick with Ati's...